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The National Institute of Standards and Technology proposed the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation algorithm as a potential future encryption standard robust enough to avoid being cracked by quantum computers. Microsoft, one of several big-money companies behind the algorithm, offered a $50k bounty for anyone who could manage to compromise the algorithm.

And then a pair of Belgian coders managed to break the algorithm in just over an hour, with a program running on a single core of a nine-year-old Intel Xeon 2.6GHz processor.

Back to the drawing board!